Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

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The fundamental issue is that any back door accessible to "the good guys" will also be accessible to sufficiently-technically-advanced "bad guys". And from the perspective of securing the United States' defense infrastructure, major corporations, etc., there are multiple sufficiently-technically-advanced "bad guys" in the world already (i.e., certain major foreign governments and their intelligence/defense complexes).

So if you're doing US national security, you cannot accept the Obama position; any technology to which our "good guy" law enforcement could get access is guaranteed to also be a technology to which a "bad guy" foreign enemy combatant could similarly gain access.

If you're a major US corporation, you cannot accept the Obama position; any technology to which our "good guy" law enforcement could get access is guaranteed to also be a technology to which a "bad guy" foreign intelligence/espionage agent could similarly gain access.

So as far as that is concerned, it is binary. You can either be secure against foreign threats, in which case you are also as a side effect impenetrable to the local "good guys". Or you can be penetrable by the local "good guys" and also as a side effect penetrable by the foreign "bad guys".

The argument advanced against Obama's position is that A) it fundamentally fails to acknowledge this reality, and B) seems to argue for deliberately compromising national security in order to... preserve national security? In other words, it is not only unrealistic, it is in fact nonsensical and self-contradictory.

We're talking about iPhones here. Not the nuclear launch codes. Maybe you have information on your phone that KGB is interested in, but most people don't.

Again, security & encryption aren't binary. It isn't on or off. Different levels of protection are appropriate for different levels of threats. The lock on my mom's suburban house is a lot weaker than the lock on the vault holding the gold at Fort Knox.

Similarly the kind of security appropriate for consumer grade cell phones might be different than the kind appropriate for guarding US national security secrets.

And you presume that compromising the iPhones belonging to the men and women who do control the nuclear launch codes wouldn't serve to compromise everything they control, by extension? Either by using the data as a lever against the people, or directly snooping, this would be a very powerful opening, and your position seems to defy all common sense.

Obama used the word "fetishizing" for a reason. It's a pretty unusual word to use don't you think? It was carefully chosen though I'm sure.

Comments like this are exactly why he used it.

Yes he did use it for a reason. He used it to make it seem perverse that you would want your information on your phone to be secure. Hes is trying, once again, to put forth the governments position that if you're not trying to hide something, you have nothing to fear.

And quite frankly, yes, I do hold the security and privacy of data as more important than the terrorism song and dance the government is playing. And I do hold that view absolutely.

Maybe you have information on your phone that KGB is interested in, but most people don't.

You have a very narrow view of what information is sensitive. Do you know how many Americans work either directly in, or in industries associated with, defense? How many of them use Apple products as part of their work?

Or let's take a more down-to-earth example: I work for a company in the health-care space. We have health records on thousands of people, and as we expand we'll have more health records on more people. With your approach, where should we draw the line? Would it be OK to use security bad enough that, say, an Eastern European organized-crime ring could break in? Or do we need to defend against them and not against the KGB? How do we figure out what level of tools to use to do that? How do we figure out whether what we have now will still be mafia-proof in five years?

Oh, and keep in mind that legally we have to protect that data, and improper access to it can not just shut down the company but send me and my co-workers to jail. How much would you be willing to compromise with that on the line? If the potential consequences to you were jail time, how much on the side of Obama and the FBI would you be? How much risk of that would you take on in order to make law enforcement's life a little bit easier?

And in case you think this is a red herring, remember the San Bernardino shooter... worked for a public-health department.

If I can gain access to your customer's data by gaining access to a cell phone owned by one of your employees then you are doing something deeply, deeply wrong.

You should fix that.

Who says it's only about phones?

The fact that it's an iPhone in the San Bernardino case is kind of a red herring; the precedent it would set is not "iPhones and only iPhones and not any other type of computing device are subject to law enforcement unlocking". The precedent it would set is that any encrypted system must be built to be decrypted on demand by law enforcement.

And that gets back to my original comment: a system the "good guys" can decrypt is one the "bad guys" will be able to decrypt too.

Slippery slope arguments are lame when they start to go like this.

Like, I get you. By allowing X which might actually be OK, we might allow X+1 to happen and that wouldn't be OK. So we must oppose X as a practical matter.

I get the practicality of that.

But when you start opposing X as a matter of principle rather than simply as a matter of practicality that's when you've gone off the rails.

Well, for one thing it's not even a slippery slope. They want to unlock his work-issued phone, not his personal phone, and the FBI admits they have, and other law-enforcement agencies admit they have, an almighty queue of other things they'd like to get force-unlocked if they can only get precedent claiming that companies do indeed have to circumvent their own products on demand.

wow, that's the best writing on this whole thing I've read. well done. I tweeted it https://twitter.com/andrewarrow/status/709158302127509504

Thank you! I really should have put a lot more into this, because I have a ton of examples. Really need to do a follow up

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